Last week, as part of an article on how spammers generate comments for blogs, I showed how to generate random messages by using the CATX function in the DATA step. In that example, the strings were scalar quantities, but you can also concatenate vectors of strings in the SAS/IML language.
Dear Rick, I am trying to create a numerical matrix with 100,000 rows and columns in PROC IML. I get the following error: (execution) Unable to allocate sufficient memory. Can IML allocate a matrix of this size? What is wrong? Several times a month I see a variation of this
My previous post described how to use the "missing response trick" to score a regression model. As I said in that article, there are other ways to score a regression model. This article describes using the SCORE procedure, a SCORE statement, the relatively new PLM procedure, and the CODE statement.
A fundamental operation in statistical data analysis is to fit a statistical regression model on one set of data and then evaluate the model on another set of data. The act of evaluating the model on the second set of data is called scoring. One of first "tricks" that I
Vector languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R are powerful because they enable you to use high-level matrix operations (matrix multiplication, dot products, etc) rather than loops that perform scalar operations. In general, vectorized programs are more efficient (and therefore run faster) than programs that contain loops. For an example
If you write an n x p matrix from PROC IML to a SAS data set, you'll get a data set with n rows and p columns. For some applications, it is more convenient to write the matrix in a "long format" with np observations and three columns. The first
I was looking at someone else's SAS/IML program when I saw this line of code: y = sqrt(x<>0); The statement uses the element maximum operator (<>) in the SAS/IML language to make sure that negative value are never passed to the square root function. This little trick is a real
A challenge for statistical programmers is getting data into the right form for analysis. For graphing or analyzing data, sometimes the "wide format" (each subject is represented by one row and many variables) is required, but other times the "long format" (observations for each subject span multiple rows) is more
While walking in the woods, a statistician named Goldilocks wanders into a cottage and discovers three bears. The bears, being hungry, threaten to eat the young lady, but Goldilocks begs them to give her a chance to win her freedom. The bears agree. While Mama Bear and Papa Bear block
Sometimes it is useful in the SAS/IML language to convert a character string into a vector of one-character values. For example, you might want to count the frequency distribution of characters, which is easy when each character is an element of a vector. The question of how to convert a
